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Christopher Hitchens, Not Going Gently

Two fierce battles are being waged this summer — one against esophageal cancer, by the irreverent columnist, commentator and critic Christopher Hitchens (who scorns the use of the word “battle” in this context), and the other for his soul, by those who hope to persuade him to convert to Christianity in extremis. It’s a paradox that Mr. Hitchens, a confirmed atheist and the author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” can appreciate, if not relish. The country’s best-known scoffer has spurred one of the most heated discussions of belief, religion and immortality in years.

Mr. Hitchens has made no secret of his illness. On June 30, on VanityFair.com, he revealed his diagnosis and announced the abrupt end of the book tour for his memoir, “Hitch-22.” And in the September issue of Vanity Fair, he published an essay in which he movingly describes his journey “from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.”

Startlingly, these updates have elicited hundreds of responses from well-wishers (and some foes), who urge Mr. Hitchens in online comments (and in their prayers, many write) to accept salvation. One wrote: “Your conversion could do for modern-day Christianity much what Paul’s did in the early days of Christianity.” Still another implored, “Mr. Hitchens, before you die give your life to Christ. Why not.”

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The Unbeliever Christopher Hitchens in 2007, before his journey into “the land of malady.”Credit
Mark Mahaney for The New York Times

On Aug. 6, The Atlantic posted a video interview with Mr. Hitchens at his home in Washington that has been much circulated. In it, the writer Jeffrey Goldberg asked Mr. Hitchens how he was doing.

“I’m dying,” he said. “I would be a very lucky person to live another five years.”

When asked, “Do you find it insulting for people to pray for you?” Mr. Hitchens responded: “No, no. I take it kindly, under the assumption that they are praying for my recovery.”

All the same, Mr. Hitchens dismissed both the notion that his cancer would lead him to make a tardy profession of faith and the idea that, if it did, such a profession would be valid.

“The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain,” he said. “I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark, but no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a remark.”

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The historian Tony Judt, who died on Aug. 6.Credit
John R. Rifkin/New York University, via Associated Press

This subject is one Mr. Hitchens has mulled over since childhood, when he decided, as he wrote in “God Is Not Great,” that it was “contemptible” to rely on religion just for comfort if it “might not be true.” As an adult whose hopes lay assuredly in the intellect, not in the hereafter, he concluded, “Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and — since there is no other metaphor — also the soul.”

That idea was echoed by Mr. Hitchens’s closest friend, the novelist Martin Amis, in an interview last week on the Charlie Rose show about his new book, “The Pregnant Widow” (in which a main character is inspired by Mr. Hitchens). Mr. Amis said his friend, like other writers, surely believed that after death, “not all of you will die,” because the printed words they leave behind constitute a kind of immortality. He added, “The desire for immortality ... explains all the extraordinary achievements, both good and bad.”

That thought also emerges in a new novel, “The Imperfectionists,” by Tom Rachman, who was born in Britain and raised in Vancouver, Canada. In the book, one of his characters, an obituary writer, interviews an aging feminist intellectual, Gerda Erzberger, who is dying of cancer. In a room that “smells of strong tobacco and of hospital,” she tells him that the greatest force in the universe is ambition.

“Even from earliest childhood it dominated me,” she said. “I longed for achievements, to be influential — that, in particular. To sway people. This has been my religion: the belief that I deserve attention, that they are wrong not to listen, that those who dispute me are fools.”

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WORD MEN Christopher Hitchens, center, with two friends, the writers Ian McEwan, left, and Martin Amis.Credit
From "Hitch-22"

Mr. Hitchens was not the only embattled British-born intellectual whose faith in articulacy caught the public eye this summer. On Aug. 6, the day of the Atlantic interview with Mr. Hitchens, the fearless historian Tony Judt died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the progressive neurodegenerative disease. Throughout this year, as his illness worsened, Mr. Judt published essays in The New York Review of Books, with his characteristic, unflinching perception, about memory, history, politics and his struggle with A.L.S.

In one of his last pieces, which he dictated, unable to control a pen, he wrote: “Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence. I have never lost that sense.”

Meditating on the importance of language, he wrote: “I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.”

He told Saul Goldberg, a New York University student who wrote an appreciation of his teacher in The Observer of Britain last weekend, that he wanted his epitaph to read, “I did words.”

Christopher Hitchens, thank God, or thank whomever, does not yet need an epitaph. He is still doing words: talking, writing and perpetuating the belief that he has upheld throughout his life: the belief, as he wrote in “God Is Not Great,” in “free inquiry, open-mindedness and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2010, on page WK5 of the New York edition with the headline: Intimations of Immortality. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe